Black July, a Week of Anti-Tamil Pogroms

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

A week of anti-Tamil pogroms swept across Sri Lanka in late July 1983, touched off when the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam ambushed and killed thirteen Sri Lankan Army soldiers near Jaffna on 23 July. In the days that followed, Sinhalese mobs, in places working from voter registration lists to identify Tamil-owned homes and businesses, burned and looted across Colombo and other cities, killing Tamil civilians and destroying thousands of homes and businesses; Stanley Tambiah documents credible reports that police and security forces in a number of instances stood by or even joined in rather than intervening.

Tens of thousands of Tamils fled Colombo and other Sinhalese-majority areas for the north and east or emigrated abroad. The riots are widely credited, Tambiah among the first to argue it, with driving young Tamils toward the militant separatism that hardened within months into the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam's insurgency, opening the Sri Lankan Civil War this atlas records as its own separate entity.